We could technically be the most advanced alien race in the universe. Think of all the random factors that went into making us. The mammalian brain, the diet of meat, the opposable thumbs and much, much more.

It is conceivable that we are the aliens and we are going to be the ones who finally find extraterrestrial life and elevate them to our level through the use of biology or monoliths.

We may well end up being the stuff of legends through the universe as the first great galactic civilisation who brought other alien life to our level through our enlightened technology or we may even colonise hundreds of other worlds and spontaneously die out, leaving behind a legacy of technology and ruins.

Humanity likes to think of itself as a small part of a greater whole but chances are we are the forefront in scientific evolution, and I find that possibility magnificent.

Ha! I ******* love you, man. I've been waiting for Mordin to make an appearance!

However I would argue that the Krogan were merely a terrible decision forced by fearing hands. They were warlike and tough and their civilisation was constructed around war.

You can elevate s species but it needs to be subtle and clever. Their civilisation needs to change to be one that is fit for galactic life, a process that could take hundreds of years.

Krogan were a hasty mistake but not a definite case. There are too many variables and Mordin is smart enough to realise this. He is just afraid of the variables but in the end he gives in and decides that the Krogan surviving is best for the Galaxy. Wrex took them to the place they needed to be, the start of a road to a better future.

It's that road that is more important than technology, the tech can just be a means to get them on that road. If you elevate them to fight your wars for you then you birth them in fire and blood, there are other, kinder ways to go about doing it.

But Mordin's point stands. It is dangerous and needs to be approached with caution if at all.

And I still love you for bringing that up. I love Mordin. ******* seashells, man...

"I wonder if, in fact, we have been observed by aliens and upon close examination of human conduct and human behavior they have concluded that there is no sign of intelligent life on Earth, and then there's the possibility that intelligent aliens might not simply ignore us but might harm us, just as humans sometimes harm what we consider lesser forms of life. You don't walk by the worm on the street and say, 'Gee, I wonder what he's thinking.' No, you step on the worm."

or you keep it as pets....we could be the pets of aliens. they could periodically visit and see how we do, and scare some alone person in the woods, an one day, when they feel that the earth is in too much pain, they may come to put us down.

I disagree with him completely. If you want more details then I've answered similar questions already in this rediculously long thread but I've done it enough times now that I'm getting tired of writing the same thing for all these arguments.

I'd appreciate it (if you really are interested) if you could just go down and see my opinion placed elsewhere and save me the trouble of typing out another 1900 character comment..

Not really. Our responsibility to progress is inherrent because we are alive, not because we are the best. It is our own evolution and we are finally at the point where we can understand it and take it into our own hands.

Change will come in time and with the work of great men and the cooperation of men like you and me, but it is change because it is for the best of humanity by the best of humanity.

But yes, I do think that if we go out into the universe we do have a responsibility to safeguard and perhaps elevate lifeforms that are beneath us. It is kinder to them, allowing them to live healthier lives and such. A parental duty, if you will.

We won't. Look at the EU and the UN. It's proof that we're at least trying to work together for a better future for all. gay rights, womens rights, equal rights. All of these show that humanity is taking baby steps towards a greater tolerance.

i have been thinking about this alot because i just read war of the worlds and i have come to like the idea that if they come to us then they are like us but they used different routes of technology than we did (like they have other materials on their planet) and they are a bit ahead of us but if we find them then its the opposite

either way the longest and most annoying thing would be trying to learn how to communicate, because they might think we are just like ants and until we can communicate we cant do much

Think of how big is the universe. (a galaxy cluster is like a dust particle in the visible universe)
Then think of how old it is. (13 billion years)
Then think of how the chances of an habitable planet on our own galaxy are already a lot.
Then think of how life finds ways to survive in the deepest ocean floors, hottest volcanos, space vacuum and radiation, etc. (see: extremophiles) ***** I don't think we're the most advanced, nor the least advanced.

I'm just saying it's possible. Granted, whilst extremophiles do exist (props to you for knowing that, btw) they are also very simple lifeforms. We evolved to where we are today because of an INSANELY specific thread of events and conditions unique to earth and to humans in general.

The universe is old, yes. It is enormous, yes. But the odds of what happened to us happening twice is so astronomically small that if life does exist (which I believe it does) we may well be the first truly civilised ones.

You see, it's nowhere near as simple as people think it is. NOWHERE near that. To be as smart as humans are we first needed the mamalian brain, something that evolved because of the dinosaurs. But the dinosaurs needed to die out before the brain could develop to it's fullest potential. However even then we needed to be really basically designed. No claws or fast movement. Just the thumb and a want to catch and eat meat.

Intelligence develops to overcome adversity and it develops in contrast to how hard it is to survive but also constrained by the limitations of the environment.

It really is a fractionally minute chance that it could happen randomly. Even in the universe so old and so large. Whilst life is a low chance, but believable to exist elsewhere, life on the same level as humans is almost out of the question. Look at all the other species that have ever existed. They were perfectly adapted to their environments so they didn't need to think too much. Humans? We stick out like a sore thumb. We're slow, weak, awkwardly designed with high centres of gravity and you get the idea.

We had a lot to overcome and the conditions in which we could overcome it.

Good point, I didn't think of that. I should search around for something (a book, article or image) that explains your point in more detail:
First we need a stable, warm star,
then a gas giant like jupiter to protect us from asteroidswith it's gravity,
then we need our rocky little planet
with it's own atmosphere (not too dense, not too light)
a steady magnetosphere against space radiation
etc.
Altough I'd like humanity to get in contact with an intelligent species that has grown, evolved and advanced without any human intervention, just to see their way of thinking, improving and inventing without being "polluted" with human concepts like economy or politics, your point is pretty strong.
We can always create a new smart species by ourselves, like you said, but it wouldn't be the same.

That's a relative word, meaning that it compares a concept to another to have a meaning.
That car is pretty big. No, that house is pretty big. Nah, that skycrapper is pretty big.
We use big, small, civilized or savage comparing the term to other stuff.
Compared to other animals, humans are civilized.

We could also be the stereotypical alien invaders. I'm saying this because people tend to project their own traits onto others. The fact that most of us think that if aliens came, they'd kill us all says a lot about us.

I hope this doesn't happen, but there's a chance. I agree though, we probably are the most technologically advanced if the UFOs we see aren't aliens.

We don't worry that aliens will kill us because we're warlike. We worry because we're sensible. They may wish to just strip our planet bare of the resources that we have mined for them and so on and so forth.

We are afraid of almost everything these days, aliens aren't warlike because they're a reflection of us but because they're an avatar of our fears of being unable to fight back.

And Halo offers and interesting take on the matter. Plague and war could be another. Ravaged by the reapers perhaps. It's not outside the bounds of theory but it's a funny one at that.

A plague travels via vectors. Between planets, humans are the vectors. Just as how bird flu from South America made it across the globe so can diseases make it across the universe. Have no fear that where there are humans, the common cold will follow.

Yes, but bacteria travels inside of human beings and other animals too. That's where they travel the best because they are able to feed and multiply by infecting your cells and changing their genetic codes to produce more of the virus. (It's pretty freaky **** when you think about it but that's just life... and occasionally death.)

Oh yeah a **** load of bacteria in our intestines. I have a feeling that government(s) would try to prevent people with certain permanent diseases from traveling to different planets. Maybe not though.

Your theory is certainly possible, but I doubt it would kill EVERYONE, probably just a gigantic amount of people though.

Oh yeah. It's not a theory I think is really plausible. Possible, aye, but implausible. I just mentioned it because it was a nice way to illustrate the point I was making by pulling on cultural references from series like Halo and Mass Effect to allow people to better empathise with the point I was making.

Humans are smart. Smart enough to make failsafes in case of this. However if a virus has an incubation period of about a month and we nail interstellar travel somehow (either through spaceships or wormholes/stargates but not teleporters because they can't transport living matter... do people really think they'd survive being atomised?) then the disease could theoretically travel from one place to another fairly effectively, similar to how it works with earth.

And it would be dormant for so long that we wouldn't even know it had infected the population for at least a month. By the time we realise there is a problem it could be too late.

However, again, implausible. I'm an optimist and I don't deal with viciously minute chances as though they are definite facts (hence my opinions on civilisations elsewhere in the universe).

They are a super advanced synthetic-organic AI that basically kills all advanced lifeforms and infuses them with synthetic materials to become reapers or other tools to help complete the cleansing. They come out of dark space every few hundred thousand years to "cleanse" the universe. The reapers also ensure that different lifeforms can become advanced and allow certain tech and ruins of other cycles to be discovered to influence the lifeforms in a similar paths.

It gets far more complicated but I suggest playing mass effect , not only for the gameplay but also for the the lore and writing. (ME1-ME2-ME3 in order)

So far no other recorded life has ever survived a reaper attack, but there was a plan by one group who decided to cyro themselves in order to outlive the attack but bailed after the reapers attacked the planet and harmed the bunkers power forcing all those occupying to die. The whole point of the third mass effect was "surviving" the reaper invasion by gathering support to defeat the reapers at earth.

They attack about every fifty thousand years, their attacks can last months to years depending on the stability of the governments during the attack, the last cycle took centuries to conquer due to its large size and military like government.

The reason why humans survived is the same reason why the other "alien" life survived, we never created a civilazation that knew about space exploration nor did we know about life. The reapers let us live so that we could be come part of the next cycle and replace the lost life.
Picture of a reaper

They're hyper-advanced synthetic lifeforms that reap all intelligent life from the galaxy every few hundred thousand years.

It's Mass Effect lore and spoilers to go to much further than that but if you want to know, play the games, they really are magnificent. They're likely pretty cheap now too. (Play them in order, of course.)

So? They're ********** that are the product of a worthless education system in a terrible culture that does not understand how to control/regulate them. That sees them as a problem rather than the result of their environment.

Yes, there's a lot of stupid people around but they're only stupid because of how they interacted with their environment in conjunction to their natural biology and vice-versa. Don't let them cloud your vision to all the magnificent things that human beings can do when they have a goal in mind.

I can see both sides of the spectrum on human potential, but I only see them multiplying like rabbits. I actually believed they would decline and it was a phase kinda thing but some of the things i see nowadays are ridiculous in my mind

And so are some of the things we see in science. We live in a time of extremes. We are at the beginning of a new age where the government is still lagging behind in the past. It will take small countries with smaller populations less time to deal with these issues and we're already seeing it happen (albeit slowly) in certain european countries. That leads to a domino effect of people seeing that the grass is greener and demanding the governments change things and blah blah blah.

There's plenty of ways things will go but much like with all of human history, we're only going up.

No problem. All it takes is a little optimism and some hard work and there are enough human beings doing just that to carry us on through. Humans just need to learn to adapt to a world of convenience and we're doing that. The internet is where all the smart people have gone and it is serving to make people smarter than they ever would have been elsewhere. (Granted, it's allowed stupid people to become stupider too but I argue that they needed better education on morals and how doing stupid things affects them mentally in the first place before they could really take advantage of the intellect-boosting effects of the net anyway.)

People like to see the problems in the world and say they are what defines humanity when the truth is that the problems change every hundred years or so, but curiosity, courage, intellect. Those are constants, for better or for worse.

And that is just self-deprication. When you look at the reality of the situation we didn't do that on purpose and a change overnight isn't happening, but when you look at the science there is a bright and green future ahead of us and a lot of clever technology is going into it.

It is just a pessimistic view of humanity that we see ourselves as better than we are. We're better than animals. It doesn't mean we can treat them like **** for no reason but it does mean we have created mathematics, language, art and science. All means with which to understand the very nature of the universe.

The likelihood that we are the most advanced civilization in the Universe seems extremely low when you consider that there at least around 170 billion galaxies, each containing up to trillions of stars.

put it this way. We are in an outer spiral arm of our own galaxy, meaning we were some of the last to be formed. Just in our own galaxy, not the universe, is it unlikely that we are the most technologically advanced.

Is that so? Well lets have a good think about that because I consider that to be an amazingly ignorant statement. (No offence meant.)

You see, on the planet earth, life has evolved. This is a completely astounding event. However in the entire several billion years that life has existed on this planet only one species can be considered to be intelligent and we are intelligent because we developed language, civilisation and so on. We found solutions to problems that stacked one on top of the other.

However, all of that was conditional on a LOT of random factors. In the dinosaur era there were smart dinosaurs but they never strived for art or built civilisations. They didn't need to because they were equiped with the brain and the physical tools to survive.

We weren't though. We had the smarts and the opposable thumbs but that's about it. We weren't as fast as most of our food, nor did we have stamina. We weren't as big nor as strong. We didn't have sharp teeth or claws. We needed to overcome problems on a daily basis by making up for what we lacked.

Now for another species to evolve to our level they will have needed to not only been on a suitable world for life to exist, but also they will need to have evolved a large brain and the high-protein diet of a carnivore without the evolutionary advantages of being naturally effective hunters.

Humans were only effective if they used their brains which meant they had to do it more and more often. Problem solving and such. However even then, that only matters if farming appears because farming finally means a civilisation can appear where your primary occupation doesn't need to be survival of yourself. You don't need to trade berries when you all pick berries but when one guy has a lot of berries and you have a lot of spears, now trade can happen.

From there spiralled art and religion and philosophy. It is such a minute chance that a species could evolve on their own like that it is amazing that we even exist at all.

Yeah, but what then? Do we punch them to death with our incredibly innefficient fists? Tear their flesh on our dull teeth?

We need to be smart in the catching, chasing, killing, skinning and eating of the animal. Being smart because everyday life to us. That allowed us to progress and I'm quite satisfied with where we ended up... I'm still not paying though.

No, an animal would be to tired to fight back. They surrounded their prey and take them down with their weapons. We can have spears back then. We used actually hunted down giant ass mammoths with spears and **** .

But that's the point. Spears. We're not naturally equipped to take down opponents. We hunted in packs with tools. We needed to coordinate quickly over distance. We needed to be able to identify where our homes were because we weren't nomadic animals.

None of that would be possible were humans not smart. We can't smell our way home so we needed to use landmarks and general directional know-how. Chasing down a gazelle could take you a long way off.

Humans were absolutely required to be smart so that they could eat. What is more, they needed to be smart to compete with the faster, more vicious and better-equiped hunters like lions and hyenas. We were put in a situation where stupidity=death on a daily basis and it made us smart. Aliens would need to have a condition that required them to be smart to survive on a daily basis but also give them a way to manipulate the world around them. We had opposable thumbs but tentacles are far more likely, given they are far simpler.

There are a lot of factors to our intelligence that people ignore, touting us as imbeciles and idiots when the simple truth is that against all odds we survived and became the smartest creatures in the known universe.

Okay, let me put it another way. Our genes contain about a 2% difference to apes. Now, of course we don't have same genes as aliens would have, but with a minute two percent meaning the difference between throwing poop at each other and going to the moon, then you must admit the chance of us being the most technologically superior race in the universe is laughable.

One other point to be made. Earth's dinosaur period lasted for hundreds of millions of years and during that time, other species on other planets may have evolved. If you're willing to say that we are the most advanced species based off of futile conjecture (no offence) then you must also admit that there are many other planets that did NOT go through a dinosaur style phase and therefore have hundreds of millions of years of a leg up on us.

Okay but if this conjecture is futile then so is yours, if not more so. I viscerally disagree with Tyson on that point because it is so typical of humans to self-deprocate like that. It's grown into a massive culture of self-punishment and it's total ******** .

That 2% difference thing is total ******** . We share 50% with a ******* banana but the Banana isn't 50% smarter than we are. Yes, small changes can lead to big differences but relying on genes like that is ******** and scientifically speaking means nothing. We are 2% different but look at all the magnificent **** we've made. The nature of the universe that we have discovered. The magnificent glory of all things that we observe and replicate in art and song. No other species has done that, not even the arguably smarter than us Dophins.

We didn't get to the top of the food chain because we were magnificent. We did it because we were weak and smart. We were smaller, weaker, slower and less naturally equiped to fight than almost every one of our competing predators and even some of our prey, but we had to THINK our way past our disabilities. Monkies don't have that. Chimps don't have that. They just have to climb trees and eat fruit. Maybe bugs. Humans had it hard and it shaped us into magnificent beings that understand the universe better than every other species understands themselves.

As for the dinosaurs? So? In that time not a single dinosaur worthy of the crown of king emerged in the intellectual court. They didn't need to. They were big, well equipped, strong and fast. But the mammals? They were small and weak and needed to be smarter to evade their predators. However had the dinosaurs not died off they would still be at the bottom of the food chain. Those smart brains were allowed to get bigger. Be faced with more problems until they ruled the earth.

So what if life has a headstart. Life can exist elsewhere easily. But easy doesn't make you smart.

So? Our lifespans, I would argue, are perfect. They require us to live and think quickly. Look at lifespans that are that long, they all belong to lethargic, slow-metabolism herbivores.

Carnivores need to move fast, think fast, eat fast, breed fast. Our brevity is what has allowed us to advance to this plane of existence. Granted, nowadays longer lives would be more beneficial in terms of more time for genius to work but in order to develop out strong brains we needed a high-protein diet. We needed meat and we weren't the fastest or the strongest which meant we needed to think out problems to death. We used tools to improve our chances and farming to make gathering crops easier. It meant that more people could be fed on the work of one, meaning art and culture could erupt.

People tend to stereotype mankind as being a lesser species because of their inadequacies but it is because of those that we got where we are today. Weakness made us strong.

Also we're already reaching mars even if with robots, that's a huge leap we've overcome
We could even find a planet with no intelligent life form but with life, like plants or animals.
Or we could find humans that are almost exactly like us if not exactly the same the posibilities in an infinite universe are literally endless.

I know, right? That kind of magnificent thinking just fills me with erectile joy.

And sadly, no. I've never read anything by Clark. These are just conclusions I came to on my own. Most people are daunted by the size of the universe in comparison to our minute existence and take it for granted that there must be greater things out there than we ourselves can create here but the simple truth is that there's no proof of that. The proof that we need is right here on earth. We humans have proved that we are magnificent. That we are intelligent. Whilst most are held up with their Sci-Fi beliefs that we are just a smaller part in a greater whole I maintain that the chances are we are the largest moving cog in this great machine of existence and unlike the other cogs... we move because we choose to, not because it's all we can do.

We are great because we want to be... and what is more beautiful than that?

Why not both? when species seperate a large distance for a large period of time it's not uncommon for them to evolve into two seperate sub species within such and such a time, it would make sense that if we accomplish light speed we would evolve in different species between galaxies.